40-Year Study Shows Birds Feeling Climate Change Effects

Perhaps you’ve already heard news of a National Audubon Society report about climate change’s effects on North American birds. Audubon announced on Tuesday that some 177 species of North American birds have shifted their range northward over the last 40 years, during the same period that average January temperatures rose by 5 degrees Fahrenheit across the continent.

The Audubon scientists found the pattern in data collected by volunteer birders on yearly Christmas Bird Counts. The consistent northward shift in so many different species – among them forest birds, feeder birds, ducks, and seabirds – points to a single, powerful cause: our warming planet.

Audubon describes their findings as part of the “grim reality” of global climate change, pointing out that more local or species-specific explanations simply wouldn’t be evident in so many species or so much of the continent. But the really frightening part is that this evidence is nowhere near the first of its kind.

Back in 2002, an article in the premier journal Nature began bluntly: “There is now ample evidence of recent climate change, from polar terrestrial to tropical marine environments.” It went on to warn that “although we are only at an early stage in the projected trends of global warming, ecological responses to recent climate change are already clearly visible.”

What kinds of changes? The authors offered a sampling: Earlier leaf-out and flowering of plants across Europe and North America, frogs breeding earlier in England, migrant birds breeding earlier in Europe and North America, northward shifts in the ranges of northern plants, treelines moving higher up mountains in Europe and New Zealand, red foxes moving north and replacing arctic foxes in parts of Canada, lowland birds moving to higher elevations in Costa Rica, northward shifts by 39 American and European butterfly species, and the appearance of warm-water species in the cold waters of California and the North Atlantic.

And that was 2002. In 2007, results very similar to the Audubon study were reported in the journals Conservation Biology and Ecology (one for birds’ summer ranges, using the Breeding Bird Survey; the other for winter ranges, from Christmas Bird Counts). And if you don’t happen to have those journals on your coffee table, you can read climate change summaries in special online reports from the World Wildlife Fund and the American Bird Conservancy.

Does all this prior evidence diminish the Audubon report at all? Of course not – but it should draw our attention back over to the 7 billion ton gorilla in the room. Seven billion tons is how much carbon we as a species are pulling out of the ground every year and putting up into the sky. It’s hard to imagine an invisible gas like carbon dioxide weighing anything, but that’s roughly like digging a three-foot-deep hole the size of Vermont and transferring all that dirt into the air. Every year.

Even as scientists toil over ever more convincing examples of climate change’s effects, we as a global society have yet to get started on changing the bad habits at the root of the problem. Climate change will continue to worsen as long as we are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (actually, it will worsen for several decades after we stop.) The numbers are so large that it’s easy to feel swamped, but Audubon has some great suggestions for how you can help. (Number one is to support the transition to clean energy – a move that could just save our economy, too.)

But back to bird watching. If there’s anything to feel good about from this new report, it’s a reminder that your efforts as bird watchers really do count for something – particularly if you make your sightings part of a collective effort to gather data in projects like the Christmas Bird Count and the Breeding Bird Survey.

13 Comments

Thanks for this informative post! I have a school, district-wide bird club in University City, Missouri. I’ll be sharing the Round Robin blog with my students this weekend as we spend the morning together doing our Great Backyard Bird Count in the University City area. We are also working on a Climate Change conference for our district in March so I’ll be using this information to teach the teachers!

Hi Joe – A change in distribution of White-winged Doves might be caused by climate change, but it could also have to do with other factors. For instance, the doves might be expanding their range northward as they discover more backyard feeders, or there simply could be more birders in the area these days, so the birds get noticed more often.

It’s always difficult to attribute single observations (like change in White-winged Dove populations) to a broad, far-reaching cause like climate change. That’s why big studies like this Audubon report and the others mentioned in this post are so important: They look at hundreds of species over a very large area, and they see a consistent change by many species, all in the same direction.

Together, all these pieces of data combine to create a very powerful piece of evidence that climate change’s effects are becoming apparent in the birds that share our neighborhoods and our country. Thanks for your comment.

I think you should realize that the report is more of a political scare report than a scientific report. Just like all the “science” we now hear about climate, it was a report of deception. Read about it here?

Plug in 1985-2010 in both both the Display periods and the Trend. Then use Mean Temp for data type and Period = Winter. Click Submit. And what you get is an almost completely level trend for the past 25 years. That is because the Audubon Scare Report left off 2006-2009 when it was published, and then the winter of 2010 was colder yet! Bringing the 25 year trend right back to NONE.